Chlorine or, 8 Days a Spy
by Yubi Shines
Summary: Chzo Mythos/Good Omens. Crowley is a master of self-reflection. There really isn't much else to do at the bottom of a pool.


*has gone completely mad*

Good Omens/Chzo Mythos crossover. Oh, yes. There is a character in the first CM game that appears for all of thirty seconds and is never quite discussed again. You don't even find out his full name unless you read the tie-in fiction, which I didn't until I was most of the way done with this story. C'mon: Jumpy, secretive English guy in business clothes with pale skin and dark hair, calls himself AJ, and happens to be the first target of a [spoiler: malevolent ghost ultimately manipulated by a territorial pain elemental/demon/cthulhuoid bastard with a dickish sense of humour]? Who else could it be?

The only thing really missing is that AJ has a mustache, and I just didn't feel like working it in. Crowley thought it would be funny to walk around for a couple days with Sharpie on his face. There.

Total spoilers for _5 Days a Stranger_. It's a very short game if you don't get stuck on the puzzles. Go play the rest of the series while you're at it. If you're not familiar with the games, then, er, Crowley done got himself in trouble via jolly and suitably spooky and nonspecific means. Yay!

Me, I'm slightly mesmerized at the thought of what "Human Resources" would actually mean in Hell's bureaucracy.

* * *

It was really quite annoying.

The stab wounds had gone from excruciating to merely appalling, though Crowley wasn't worried about that. Even if he did untie himself, he wouldn't have the strength to heal a limping sparrow, let alone ragged holes big enough to stuff oranges into. Eventually this body would remember it needed oxygen and had lost most of its vital fluids long before he had been hidden down here by that prat in the leather jacket. All that was keeping it together was sheer cussedness and the faint hope that the idiots in the manor would wander by and see him in here. How long had it been since this pool was properly cleaned? The water looked almost opaque.

Feh. At least there wouldn't be much hassle when the body finally gave up the ghost. Crowley had a pretty good hunch that he'd get a replacement without the usual hours, occasionally weeks, of wrangling with Human Resources. The folks downstairs weren't eager to deal with him these days for some reason, which was rather odd if he put his mind to it... Anyway, he wasn't concerned about losing much time by dying. Be a pity to miss out on the last decade of the twentieth century. There wasn't any assurance that the next one would be as fun.

Crowley was, to be honest, a bit grouchy at being beaten by some puppet with a machete. That was embarrassing. He had been taken by surprise, that was all.

-----

He's been in haunted places before. Dunno if Azrael is just sloppy or what, but it's not hard to find garrulous ghosts hanging around whining that they were never loved or they had been unsung geniuses and would now show them, show them **all**. Usually they're pretty localized and still behave like they have a distinct body, and all it takes is to call a representative from Up or Down to come claim them already, the lazy berks.

Crowley has never come across a ghost that's lingered for so long it seems to have sunken into the foundations of the manor. Perhaps that's just what happens when they're left alone: They forget what it's like to be bound in a corporeal form, and dissipate in the air like a puff of perfume. He certainly couldn't detect much intelligence here anymore. There was a strange lean to it, though. As if the reason for its elusiveness was because there hadn't been much to begin with, and what was left had been twisted by something entirely alien.

The second floor was empty. The reporter had gone to look for tools to break the doors open, and the treasure hunter—Crowley was amused at Harty's insistence on the title, the human capability for self-delusion is just wonderful—had wandered off somewhere. Crowley had convinced the kid to go play outdoors for a while. It was a little pathetic how easily the boy took orders. Missing father figure, he supposed.

It had been a lark, at first, to create an alternate identity to keep tabs on the so-called Ministry of Occultism. It was the same story all around: His superiors wanted him to watch out for any organized interest in the supernatural. Crowley once pointed out that the most these human agencies did was conduct the odd exorcism and the rare times they did happen on something important, it was from blindly tinkering around with things they didn't understand and the only damage they did was to themselves. In fact, since the humans tended to take their dabblings in the esoteric as proof against an all-powerful God, it actually worked in Hell's favour. His superiors responded by saying if he was dissatisfied with his orders, he could come down and they'd find something more suiting to his predilections. After that exchange, Crowley twitched a lot until Aziraphale came over to ask what was wrong, took one look at him, and promptly brought him to the pub.

Anyway. When both ministry officials and the angel had expressed an interest in DeFoe Manor, making noises about ghosts and upstart sadomasochistic cults, Crowley figured he might as well volunteer to take a look. It wasn't as if he had anything productive to do at the moment.

He prowled around, ignoring the other locked doors it would be trivial for him to open. He could feel nothing of interest behind them, only in the room at the end of the corridor. More to the point, every inch of the manor felt wrong, pulled ever so slightly to a direction that physical eyes could not follow. It took him just over a week to track the slippery here-there-gone-again feeling to this area.

He pressed a hand to the door, heard a mechanical click, and tried the handle.

It was a bathroom. Crowley scowled. How unimaginative.

Still, he inspected the walls, peered into cabinets, looking for some reason why his associate sent him here. There was an unpleasant moment when he twitched the shower curtains aside. For just a second, the word **_father_** was painted in vivid red on the walls, with an emaciated figure reaching out of a pool of blood and black bile. He recoiled, but the figure grasped at an invisible neck to his left, and then the bathtub was spotless white. Empty.

He rattled at the jammed window in frustration. Theoretically, he could get out as easily as he came in, as whatever it is that keeps the three humans here was never made with demons in mind. But Aziraphale was counting on him, and anyway, he's spent eight days a-snooping about in here, and it's a good thing he thought to come here without the Bentley, some snotty kid from the local boarding school would be vandalizing it otherwise, and he's bloody well going to find _something_ for his troubles. He turned to leave.

His foot caught on a couple of uneven tiles, which skittered and clattered across the room. Underneath them was

_The voice from behind the door comes rarely, doing little to distract him from the sour gnawing in his stomach and the rust of the manacles teasing his wrists, and it hurts_

_The wooden idol grins down at him as his father, stinking of regret and spilled brandy, raises his hand for the final blow, and it hurts_

_The boy, his brother, babbles useless soothing noises and inexpertly bandages his wounds, his clumsy hands jarring at fractured bones, and it hurts_

_The tall man reaches out to him, his face as blank and grey as the stone walls of his cell, and his spidery red fingers drag him back, ripping open a part of him he was never aware of until now and it hurts, and the tall man's will bears down on him and it hurts, and even clothed and masked he is more naked now than he has ever been in his captive life and it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts_

Crowley found himself on his hands and knees, staring into what the loose tiles had uncovered. His sunglasses lay a few feet away. It was as if he had opened a vein that bled memories, pouring them into his senses. It was obscene. No one should be looking as directly as this into someone's mind. In his recollections of the day that he didn't quite think about anymore, Crowley could remember being examined by a pair of blue eyes and being frozen with terror. Now, from the emotions leaking into him, he knew that this time he was on the giving end of that fear.

Before his eyes, the void took shape and form, and he was looking at a patch of packed dirt. There were bones just on the surface, jaundiced with age. The crown of the skull was cracked and indented. Crowley knew what had happened to it.

He gave a low cry of disgust as he scrabbled to cover it, stamping down hard on the tiles so no one would find them again, and dove for the door. He was going to get out and get Aziraphale, and maybe even those ministry idiots would have some ideas, and—

At the end of the hallway was a tall man who looked at him with a featureless grey face.

The next few minutes were something of a blur. Crowley found himself in the backyard, leaning on the toolshed and breathing heavily. He had not been followed. The empty pool gleamed. In the unkind moonlight, the freshly-dug holes in the ground look like wounds, like graves.

He pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to catch his breath.

It was maybe an hour before he heard the back door slam and the boots crunching on the concrete. The footsteps were quite unlike the stiletto clicks of the reporter, or the uncertain tread from the schoolboy.

Crowley sighed and straightened up. "Harty, listen very carefully. Have you seen—"

The machete caught the moonlight in one swift flash.

-----

Now, he was tethered to a hook on the bottom of a pool, and it was digging right in the small of his back and no doubt further ruining his shirt.

...Bugger Aziraphale, anyway, him and his "Do pop in and take a look at DeFoe Manor, would you, it's a little out of the way for me. Not to worry, I'll look after your end of things while you're off." If Heaven was so bloody concerned, it could bloody well come here and take a look itself without outsourcing. Meanwhile, the moment he was back on Earth he was going to go straight home and put his feet up, well in the knowledge that this wasn't his problem anymore.

Maybe he wouldn't mention the humans he would be leaving behind, when he reconvened with the angel. It was possible that the... something... inhabiting the manor was just antsy about a demon wandering onto its turf and disrupting its game. No reason to think they were in real danger. Aziraphale was not a forbidding creature in the usual sense of the word, but he had a way of shaking his head with a disappointed "If that's so, dear," that just made Crowley squirm.

No, what was annoying Crowley right then was that his eyes were really starting to sting. That bastard Harty must have dumped a gallon of chlorine into the water. What was he thinking, that it would dissolve the corpse? If he ever saw Harty again, Crowley decided, a punch to the jaw was the least he owed him.

-----

_There was the Spying Thief, who came to the house of the Bridgekeeper to learn the secrets of the Prince and of the Order, a pawn of masters who would pervert the glorious scheme of the King._

___[...] The Spying Thief came first to the Bridgekeeper, and was greatly consumed with Fear. "I know you, Bridgekeeper. I know the scheme of the Prince that allows you to remain after Death. I know this house that is your Mind. I know all this, and I will foil your plan."_

___And the Prince knew that the Spying Thief spoke the truth, and allowed the Bridgekeeper to throw down the Spying Thief, and truly did he know the name of the King._

—The Books of Chzo: The Book of the Bridge


End file.
